America is Coming Out on Facebook

Americans recently celebrated National Coming Out Day (which started in 1988), a time to raise awareness for the LGBT community to fight homophobia. In honor of this year’s celebration, Facebook published a report regarding trends of people who have “come out” over the past year.

“Coming out” is defined in two ways according to Facebook – either changing one’s profile to same-gender attraction, or submitting a customized gender as transgender or bisexual.

Did you know that over 26 million Americans put a rainbow overlay on their Facebook profile pictures after the Supreme Court announced the marriage equality law on June 26? It was also a day where the social platform saw a spike in users “coming out”, according to recent data.

Over the past year, approximately 800,000 Americans updated their Facebook profile to express a same-gender attraction (or custom gender). This number is on track to be triple what it was, per day, just a year ago. The Supreme Court decision supporting same-sex marriage helped the reported numbers, but Facebook is also noticing an overall positive trend toward people coming out online and more support for LGBT group pages as well. 5.7 million Americans have joined at least one of the 300 popular LGBT pages, a large increase of almost 25 percent since last year, acquiring more than 150,000 new fans.

“Not only has the total number of Americans who have come out on Facebook risen dramatically, but so has the number coming out each day,” Facebook reports. “While this figure may be somewhat conflated by growth in the number of people on Facebook, the sheer magnitude of this increase suggests that the LGBT movement has made significant strides in recent years.”

Do you have families or friends who came out on Facebook during the week of the Supreme Court decision?